PSNA touts cross-vertical flexibility at ASIS

DALLAS—In a reflection of what the company itself has done, the PSNA (Panasonic Systems Network company of America) booth at the ASIS show here in October featured a panoply of Panasonic products—security-specific, and non-security specific—grouped together to show solutions for different vertical market applications for a school, stadium, retail outlet, and a courtroom.

Born about a year ago, PSNA is a combination of the former security arm, the Panasonic Systems Solution Company, and the electronics business, the former Panasonic Communications Company of North America.

While ISC West was PSNA's “coming out party,” said Christine Amirian, VP of marketing for PSNA, the ASIS booth showed “a fully evolved version of what we can do [with the full array of Panasonic products] in different verticals.”

PSNA president Bill Taylor noted that PSNA is a $1 billion company with 183 employees in the U.S. It works with “8,000 resellers, 15 to 16 distributors and about 10 very large systems integrators.” With more than “25,000 products” it makes sense to put “them into logical groupings” for customers, Taylor said.

It also aligns PSNA with its parent company in Japan, which had already re-organized along these lines.

Taylor and Amirian were eager to show off the different vertical solutions.

The school solution included an overhead camera, a whiteboard, a short-throw projector, overhead PTZ camera and an audio product—a pendant worn by the teacher. All of the products work together to help the classroom function efficiently and to secure it. The pendant has multiple capabilities. It can be used to amplify the teacher's voice or to alert people outside the classroom in the case of an emergency.

“The demo shows how every teacher can be a member of the security team” but yet, “it's not just a security solution,” Amirian said. “And it's not a theoretical solution,” either, she said, noting that all of the applications shown are either currently available or will be “available in the very near term.” The school solution, for example, has already been implemented in a number of schools in Florida and California and it [the notification component] is mandated by the state legislature in Ohio.